by Nate Crowley
Moments later, Fingal came rushing onto the deck with a rifle, calling for backup as he scanned the mist. Mouana put her hand on his shoulder, and motioned for him to lower the weapon.
“Don’t worry,” she said, and the man looked puzzled. She was about to tell him it had been nothing, that she had simply been testing her gun, but immediately thought better of it. There was no point in secrets anymore. She had no doubt Dust had survived the shot, and once she caught up with them, there would be no second chances. If they were going to make it, they were going to do it together—she and Wrack and everyone, like it had been on Tavuto. And if that wasn’t enough to get them to High Sarawak, then she would be proud to fail in the attempt.
“Gather the crew,” said Mouana. “There’s some things I need to tell them.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
WRACK WAS DREAMING the river when the voice began speaking to him. He was a turtle, bitten in two and tumbling along the bottom in a cloud of pink, and fishes were nibbling at him.
“I need your help with the directions again, mate. We’re about to run out of map.”
It sounded like that man who was always in his father’s study. Fingal, was it?
“You’re probably best off asking my Dad,” said Wrack, and went on being the turtle.
“Your father’s gone, Schneider. You’re on the boat, in Grand Amazon. You remember?”
“I’m dead, aren’t I?” said Wrack, the vision collapsing, and Fingal nodded. He was smoking his pipe, the bowl’s glow illuminating his bite-pocked face in the dimness of the hold. Wrack was disappointed, but not surprised anymore. The remembrance that he was dead was fairly frequent now, coming many times in a day. Still, though, it was so easy to forget, when he let his mind wander to the water and the trees.
Even here below the waterline where his mind was stored, it was sweltering. Fingal was in a dreadful shape, his body dried and wiry like spoiled jerky. Wrack was worse. Almost all the ship’s beasts had fallen apart by now; his crab form nested in the centre of those that could still move, shrouded in a pungent knot of fins, slime and sloughing scales.
To the left of them was the casket containing his mind. The dead were queued by a tap in its side, waiting wearily to draw cups of preservative from his own reservoir.
“They allowed to do that?” said Wrack, feeling a little invaded. Fingal nodded, then shrugged in apology as he puffed at the pipe.
“’Fraid so mate. We won’t let you run out, but we need a bit of what’s spare now we’ve used the whiskey from Rummage.”
“Fair enough. How long has it been since Rummage, anyway?”
“Six days, mate,” said Fingal, faint concern etched on his face. Wrack suspected he had already asked this question today. Nonetheless, he was amazed. With his mind in such a fluid state, the time had vanished like blood in the current. For the first two days, he had been barely cogent; thinking he had been back on Tavuto, he had grown terrified of the crew, and had cowered in the bilges of the ship, wondering where his friend was.
Then he had remembered his ‘friend’ had tortured a man to death, massacred a boatful of refugees, and attempted to sell half Tavuto’s survivors to a pub, and had been less keen to seek her out. As his mind had pieced itself together, he had wandered the boat, intermittently letting himself seep into other places for relief. He remembered there being a gunfight on one of the nights—no, two actually—but he had stayed well out of it. It had become more and more tempting just to let himself dream than to watch the struggles of the ship.
He wasn’t sure when the dreaming—that weird inhabitation of Grand Amazon’s dead things—had become possible, but he remembered the first time he experienced it. He had been watching a living sailor gut a fish he had caught and, for a bit of a laugh, had slipped into the fish’s mind, had made it thrash and gurn on the sailor’s lap.
And the further they went into the wilderness, the nearer they drew to that invisible glow in the deep jungle, the easier it became. He could just... lose himself, into the head of anything dead that drifted by. It had mystified him at first—the part of him that remained resolutely a librarian was baffled, as previously he’d only been able to see and operate through things created by the Lipos-Tholon factories or on Tavuto, by the application of miasma. Then the explanation had dawned on him—there must be miasma in the air out here. Not much, but enough for him to make connections, and connections that became stronger the further they went into the forest.
Even now, as he considered it, he was a salamander, being chewed by a centipede somewhere under a rotten log. The centipede coughed patiently, and sounded like Fingal.
“Sorry,” said Wrack, coming back to the hold, and there was an awkward pause. “Why are you here again?” he asked sheepishly, as he had momentarily forgotten. Fingal sighed, and tapped his pipe against the barrel he sat on.
“Directions, Wrack. We’re nearly out of map, and only you know where to go from here. I’ve left you alone for the last few days, figured you needed to rest, more than anything else. We’d pushed you a bit too hard. But now I need you.”
Wrack felt a surge of bitterness, as he remembered the trireme fight, and the last time Fingal had ‘needed’ him.
“When you say ‘I,’ I presume you mean you’re running an errand for Mouana since she won’t speak to me, right?”
Fingal looked awkward, and his eye flicked to the far end of the hold.
“He means what he said, Wrack,” said Mouana, stooped low under the beams of the hold. “He’s the captain now, not me. And he needs you. But I’d like to talk with you, too, if you’ll accept it.”
“I’ll leave you folks to it,” said Fingal, getting up in a hurry. “I’ve still got those... repairs to finish up on the port turrets. Come on, you rotten lot,” he added, gesturing at the sailors queuing for preservative, and they shuffled from the hold with an air of disappointment.
“Are you alright?” asked Mouana quietly, when they had left.
“Yeah, amazing,” muttered Wrack, and she winced.
“I mean, are you alright to talk? You’ve had a rough time, and I didn’t want to bother you until you were ready.”
“I’m talking, aren’t I? Anyway, I didn’t think you were in the habit of caring.”
“A lot’s changed,” said Mouana, looking down at her hands.
“Yeah, I heard. I’m not surprised they binned you as captain, but I have to say I’m shocked you didn’t gun them all down for trying.”
Mouana’s face fell as he spoke, and her mouth contorted as if testing the shape of words.
“I stepped down, after Rummage.”
“What? I suppose the Bruiser ratted you out, did he?” said Wrack with an insincere laugh.
“He tried,” said Mouana, in a voice next to a whisper. “I destroyed him before he could speak. And that’s why I stepped down.”
“Oh,” said Wrack. That was a hard one to take in, and he wasn’t sure how to react. “You said you needed something from me again?”
“No, I told you already. It’s you I need, Wrack, not what you can do.”
Wrack dipped his eyestalks in consternation. “Maybe it’s because they’re draining my preservative, but I really don’t have any idea what you’re talking about.”
“Listen... can you... can you read minds, Wrack?”
“This isn’t making things less confusing, you know. But... yes, I suppose. I can tell you what it’s like to be any number of dead bees right now, as it happens.”
“I mean, could you read my mind?”
“What, go in your head?” said Wrack, incredulous. “I wouldn’t want to, frankly!”
“Please,” begged Mouana. “I’m not a great talker. In fact, I’m dreadful. But I need you to understand. I spoke with Dust, Wrack. I realised... look, please. Will you go in my head? This is the best way I can find to say sorry.”
“Alright,” said Wrack. “Sit down.”
Mouana sank to the filthy deck, steel legs folded, and close
d her eye. There was a long, sombre pause, after which Wrack made a noise through his speakers like he was straining to have a shit.
Mouana looked perplexed, and opened her eye again. “I don’t think it worked.”
“That’s because I didn’t do anything. I just wanted to irritate you while I had the upper hand. I’m going to do it now.”
Wrack let himself fall sideways into Mouana’s head, and the hold vanished. Before vision returned, a rush of feelings smashed into the back of his eyes; shame, rage, and far, far more fear than he would ever have expected. Then an image began to resolve itself. Wrack was in a tent, its sides flapping in the wind, trying to write a letter. He ground his teeth as the nib trembled on the empty page. He strained for words, but they wouldn’t come past the shrieking of the ’drick...
“OH, DEAR, MOUANA,” said Wrack, a long time later, touching a claw to her knee. “I’m so sorry. She... she really messed you up. I’m very glad you shot her.”
“So am I,” said Mouana, looking hollow, and held Wrack’s claw between two of her huge fingers. “But it doesn’t make it right, any of what I’ve done.”
“Maybe not, but I can hardly blame you for having lost your mind, given I spent a lot of this morning being a dead catfish. I wish we’d spoken earlier. I just thought you were really into... you know, war.”
“Yeah, well you can talk. You were a fucking battleship.”
They shared a weak laugh, and Wrack spoke again.
“I won’t lie; I’m still not comfortable with some of the stuff you’ve done. It could take a long time to get comfortable with. But we’ve both got a lot more past than we’ve got future left, and certainly there’s no time to unravel it all. Shall we just let all this be, and help Fingal get this over with? I daresay Dust is the sort of person who has a habit of coming back from being shot, after all.”
“I’d like that, yes,” said Mouana, nodding solemnly. Wrack had never heard her speak like this; not since those early days when they had shivered together on the slave ship’s deck. It was a world away from the grimacing warlord who had led them into Rummage, and a lot more like the woman he had just shared a head with.
“My legs are rotten as shit,” he announced. “Could you carry me up on deck, and we’ll see if I can work out where to go next?” Mouana fished him out from the mound of coiled sealife onto her slab of a shoulder, where he clung on with a claw.
“And bring my book,” he added.
WHEN THEY CLIMBED out of the dark a great shout crashed over them, bright and fierce as the midday sun. The whole ship had clearly been waiting up here in silence, to see if they would emerge together. Now they had appeared, the crew exploded into a mass of roaring faces and raised fists. It scared Wrack at first, seeing all those dead faces split and screaming, but when he saw the joy in their eyes, he raised his claw back at them. Another cheer rolled across the deck, and even Eunice broke into a grin.
Wrack’s speakers emitted a limp, tinny “Hooray” that was immediately drowned in the noise. It didn’t matter—the sight of him and Mouana together was enough to keep the sailors waving their fists. For those who had been with them since Tavuto, riddled as they now were with bullet holes, burns and bites, it clearly meant the world. Whatever her sins, and whatever his madness, the two of them working together had saved them all from that place, and Wrack could see from their faces that they believed they would do it again.
They clearly needed the boost. There couldn’t have been more than a hundred and fifty left, and many of them were hideously damaged. Even the couple of dozen living that remained were emaciated, and many of the dead were only held together with bandage, tar and staples. Their skin was peeling off in the heat, and insects swirled over the deck in a throbbing black cloud—only the weeks of preservative rub kept them from being eaten alive.
Wrack felt for them—even with the reinforcements the miasma had worked on the crab’s body, and the mechanical enhancements Fingal’s technicians had made, he was rotten through. Without Mouana carrying him, he would have been dragging himself across the deck on a trail of slime.
They wouldn’t have to last much longer. He could feel High Sarawak, like a second sun that shed no light, boiling in perpetual dawn on the horizon. It drew him like their flesh drew the flies, something at once alien and achingly familiar. As he focused on that strange, silent pulse, it reminded him—he was meant to be navigating.
“Where are we, then?” he said, in a businesslike fashion, as Fingal waved the cheering crew back to their work.
“Upper Extrañeza, crab-man,” said Kaba, who had appeared by their side as they moved to the bow of the craft. She had lost a forearm since Wrack had last seen her, presumably as they had duelled with Dust’s outriders. “Up past the next bend’s a settlement marked as ‘Big Mistake’ on the charts from Rummage, and then that’s your lot. The ink stops there. There’s a couple of shit drawings of monsters, but that’s it.”
“We passed Gustav’s Rest yet?” said Wrack, with a burst of excitement. On his third and final expedition to Grand Amazon, when he was an old man and the main channel of the Sinfondo had been heavily settled, Waldemar had finally made a trip up the Esqueleto, and settled on the banks of one of its tributaries with his family. He had never written again, and history had forgotten him.
“Yeah, actually—it said that in brackets next to Big Mistake, now you mention it.”
When they turned the bend, Wrack’s excitement faded. The forest opened up into a narrow floodplain, where a few feeble patches of mud sprouted crops in shoddy, yellowing rows. On the bank, perched on stilts black with rot, stood a cluster of tumbledown houses, paint flaking with age. Collapsed dwellings sprawled to either side of the meagre hamlet, while ruins poked through the tall grass of the plain. At first the place seemed deserted, but as they chugged by, pale faces showed at the windows and ragged figures appeared on the sagging excuse for a dock. The inhabitants, who looked barely more healthy than the boat’s crew, stood and watched them pass with hostile frowns.
Wrack could see why the town had been renamed. Clearly, the frontier metropolis Waldemar had dreamed of had never quite worked out. Still, now their voyage had surpassed the explorer’s last reach into the frontier, he felt the moment needed commemorating.
“Mouana, throw them the book,” said Wrack.
“Steady on, Wrack,” said Fingal, sucking on his pipe. “That’s all we’ve got, beside you and the map.”
“Believe me, I know it by heart,” he answered. “And anyway, the book runs out here too, just like the map. They’re probably better off with it than we are. Go on, toss it on the dock, for Waldemar’s sake.”
Mouana pitched the book out over the river, and it landed on the settlement’s dock with a dry thud. The villagers peered at it with a mixture of disgruntlement and fear, then went back to watching the boat.
“Well, there we are,” said Wrack, “The end of civilisation. For the record, I think we need to take the next left.”
And so they did, and sailed off the edge of the map.
THE DAYS THAT followed passed fitfully. Wrack spent some of the time playing cards with Mouana, as they shared what they could remember of their lives. Mouana usually won, but Wrack had his revenge by singing songs he half-remembered, rendered tuneless and mangled by the device that processed his speech. She was better company now she wasn’t leading a crusade.
The rest of the time, he spent drifting between the dead things as they tumbled past them in the river, and trying to shake off the sensation of tentacles and terrible hunger. Sometimes he would be woken by Fingal or Kaba, to settle one of their arguments about the best course to take, but largely he was left to himself.
In the time he spent awake and on deck, he saw marvels, the likes of which Waldemar would have given his specimen collection just to glimpse.
A wormer’s paddleboat passing in the night, refusing all contact, sigils of glowing blood daubed upon its hull. A figure crouched on its upper deck, silentl
y nursing a harpoon.
A measureless lake, caked in grumous yellow skin, where pulsing larvae fired imagoes into the sky. The air thrummed with the hunger of the newborn, then with the clatter of rifles as the insects swooped.
The shell of a long-dead starship, strobed by lightning, as black-toothed cannibals shrank from their searchlights. Shouts and sirens in the dark.
Tracts of flooded forest, where osteoglossid titans swam. The crack of alien dentition on home-kind nuts; flickering shoals, and glowing worms beneath regis lilies.
Still waters, where church-gilled catfish cruised under duckweed, stately and ancient. The baking sun on silent water, songs chanted in a dozen tongues.
Shallows, and the perilous scrape of sand on steel; shouting and panic, as crates were hoyed to lighten the load. A gunfight, and Mouana’s staying hand as she warned him not to intervene, lest Dust learn their secret. Bullets thudding into wood, and the gush of water.
Monsters on the banks; a thing that chased them through the shallows on its haunches, and an awful fight. Cries of loss when it was done, as the beast’s mate followed them for miles behind the trees.
Pink shapes rolling; riverine orca, communing in clicks as they stalked lord-worms in the afternoon rain.
Species, taxa, systems that had never been documented, or whose origins had been forgot. Great leathery factory slugs, flesh-roots pulsing, as they struggled on the banks of nameless creeks. Metal ants, and smoke-belching spouts of cartilage.
True strangeness, where green lost its meaning in a forest of new colours. Places where the vines glowed black, and groves that ate light. Places where the water sang.
Determination, and bullets, saw them through. They were always just more aggressive than what they encountered, always made it through with a couple more dents in the hull, a few more bodies dragged into the water. Ahead of them, growing stronger with each mile, the ancient city called to Wrack. And always, a horizon behind them, their pursuit rumbled on in a distant wall of smoke and light.
